If you can't post some minor key menace and unsettling vibes on All Hallows' Eve, when can you?
This is Pioneer to the Falls by Interpol, from their 2007 album Our Love To Admire ... and it sounds massive, still.
An unscheduled RIP post for actress Teri Garr, who has died after a long battle with MS.
She had a long and varied career, often in light, comedic roles, but this is how I will remember her - the put-upon, long-suffering Ronnie Neary in Spielberg's excellent Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As ever, the Beeb has a proper obit. RIP.
Someone who knows better will probably correct me, but I think this was just about the first song he recorded as David Bowie (rather than as Jones or under any other name), in 1966. The version featured here, however, was recorded and broadcast on this exact day in 1999, on the Mark Radcliffe show on Radio 1. And it's ace.
This is Plainclothes Man from Heatmiser's final album, 1996's Mic City Sons. If you think the singer looks and sounds like the patron saint of this series, Elliott Smith, well done you, for it was he.
So said BBC TV weatherman Michael Fish 37 years ago today, in response to a caller to the station who'd enquired about French weather warnings that a hurricane was on its way.
Of course it was on its way and if, like me, you lived in East Kent you were in for a hell of a night. I woke at around 2am - the power was already off, and the noise! The continuous booming roar of the wind was beyond my sleep-addled, teenage comprehension, to the extent that my first thought was that a nuclear bomb had been dropped close by and this was the shockwave. I know, I know, but I couldn't understand what else would have the power to shake the house like that, and Glasnost was still a couple of years away, after all.
The next morning I discovered a hole in the outside of my bedroom wall, where a roof tile from next door had blown across two driveways and embedded itself in our pebbledash. I also spent some time gathering the remains of our greenhouse, which was in bits all over the garden, before exploring the neighbouring hospital, the hill-top wooded grounds of which were decimated. A particularly massive beech tree had gone over on the print shop, completely destroying it, as I recall. My dad worked at the hospital and had walked to work in pitch darkness at 5am, clambering over fallen trees to get there. He also tells the tale of dodging empty milk bottles as the wind picked them up and blew them horizontally across a yard, like little glass missiles.
I'm not going to embed the Michael Fish clip - we've all seen it before, and it seems very harsh on him. But here he (sort of) is a year later, immortalised in song with a clutch of his meteorological mates. With bonus Wogan content!
By the way, A Tribe of Toffs didn't get the Christmas Number One, in the end, despite the appearance on primetime Wogan - this peaked at 21.
The Internet (never wrong, right?) tells me that this is the earliest professionally shot gig footage of Athens' finest, REM. Recorded on the 10th of October 1982 at the Pier Club in the Cameron Village Underground, Raleigh, by cable channel WYFF-TV of Greenville, South Carolina ("your friend"), this is less than two months after the band's debut EP Chronic Town was released.
The audio has been EQ'ed to within an inch of its life, in a manner that may or may not be to your taste. What's undeniable, though, is the brilliance of both the setlist and the general time-capsulism of this absolute gem of a find. Completists should also note the moment the band's early producer Mitch Easter joins them on second guitar for 1,000,000.
I saw REM live twice, in the blistering heat of the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1995, and in a football stadium (of sorts) in 2005. But oh, to have seen them like this...
I'll be honest, I struggled a bit with Electronic at the time. I didn't really want Johnny Marr songs to sound like New Order, and I definitely didn't want them to sound like The Pet Shop Boys. I was then, as now, more than a little parochial in my tastes, and, if truth be told, was probably not handling the end of The Smiths very well. I tried though, helped by seeing Getting Away With It on 7" for 49p in the Woolworths' bargain bin. I still have that, of course. The vinyl is in great nick, because I didn't play it very often, though the sleeve suffered at Woolies before I got my hands on it, sadly. And it was a great, striking sleeve.
Looking back, I can view Electronic in a kinder light. Certainly kind enough to have invested in their retrospective best of, Get The Message. You could do a lot worse, you really could.
Johnny is barely in this video, a fact I might have appreciated at the time. He does contribute a lovely solo in the middle though. Plus the chorus to this has that killer "clear to see" couplet. All together now...
